Giorgio Levi Della Vida (1886-1967) was not only an eminent Islamologist, he was also a man with solid roots in his own time. He taught in Naples and Rome, then for the ten years 1939-1948 at the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the few university teachers who, when the oath of loyalty to the Italian fascist regime was introduced in October 1931, opted not to accept that act of submission. His memoirs, Fantasmi ritrovati, were published in 1966; the book, now out of print, conjures up a tableau vivant of half a century of intellectual encounters in Italy and Europe between the wars. Among the portraits he paints there is the astounding story of those crucial days in June 1924 when the fascist government became a full-blown regime. This article presents extended extracts from that story.

When I think about America, I think about a great diversity of types of people, from different backgrounds, national origins, races, religions, classes and points of view. The US is made up of descendants of African slaves and recent African immigrants; mid-western farmers and Asian Americans whose families come from nearly every Asian nation; Jewish families from Eastern Europe and Native Americans who have owned our land for centuries before any others. These are only a few of the stories that make up the rich diversity of American society. Diversity is our greatest asset.

It is with a woman's memory and body that I am happy to serve literature. In the entrails of past ages I try to search, among so many memories, for women's memory in particular. I am trying to find out how this memory is made up, from what material and with what texture. In the final analysis this memory has always been all around, at every period since the creation of the world.

The meeting between rationalities is the very core of the psychoanalytic treatment of madness. For we see madness as a field of research in the area of historical, political and natural disasters where the social bond disintegrates, language slips away, the unimaginable happens and tried and tested rationalities fail.

The colonial project has three interrelated facets. It is at once a practice; a body of knowledge; and a technology for mind change, or simply mental engineering. Decolonization is necessarily a negation of the three-in-one character of the colonial process, to produce a third possibility: independence, liberation and social justice. Colonialism as mind-engineering results from colonialism as practice and text but it also aids them. Mind-engineering is directly the result of colonialism as text, for the colonial text is simultaneously a boost to the minds behind colonizing practices and a prison house for the mind of the colonized. The battle between the colonial text and its dialectical opposite, the anti-colonial text, is central to the entire process of decolonization. Achebe and Hegel exemplify this.

It has never been easy to understand what intellectuals are, whether they still exist, or whether they are vanishing into a huge ‘cultural middle class’ where high culture and mass culture meld into one another. With particular reference to Italy, Alfonso Berardinelli looks back at the undisputed intellectuals of the past, suggesting that they were their own critics and most determined detractors at the same time, yet full of confidence in their capacity to lay down laws for organizing and developing society. In contrast, today's intellectuals seem to embrace anonymity, and in a context defined as postmodern, they have given up being an elite that judges, whose duty is not only to produce knowledge but also to propose values and social models.

… Let us situate ourselves vis-à-vis the judge that affects each of our hours and that we call ‘memory’. Memory is a law-court in permanent session but it is arbitrary: it hands down gratuitous reward and generous punishment. Whole years of our existence remain buried under the weighty stones of oblivion and, in contrast, dazzling deeply rooted moments rise to the surface. The peculiarity of this inner court is its utter amorality. It does not act in accordance with codes or established moral laws, not is it founded on any ethical values, whether positive or negative. Of course it cannot be said that it is unconnected with consciousness, but it acts, so to speak, according to the instinct of consciousness.

This brief essay examines emergent spaces for politics and emergent political actors. The particular concern here is with types of politics that do not run through the formal political system, one with shrinking options for a growing number of US citizens and immigrants. Informal political actors and street-level politics in cities are major instances of this. US cities have a long history of street-level politics. The contents, the purposes, the mobilizers and the enactors of these politics have changed over time. Today's global cities are a very specific type of place because they bring together both the most globalized sectors of capital and the new transnational professionals, on the one hand, and a growing number of immigrants and native minoritized groups in a single, complex space.

This is a multi-authored review of a book that is extremely rich and lengthy (43 chapters, among whose titles are: Chapter III, In the name of the Lord God, this round Earth of the Ancients becomes flat again. Or perhaps not? (In which — by way of preface — the story is told of how our great Sphere, which was measured and drawn by Egyptian Alexandria, became a Mystery, Sacrilege and dark until ten years ago); Chapter X, Strabo: ‘The Pillars? Gibraltar or Cádiz! But none of us have ever really seen them' (An impossible Interview with the great Greek historian/geographer who summarizes for us what was known by the great men who preceded him. Christ had not yet been born and the site of those famous pillars had already been lost); Chapter XII, With Herodotus in the Eldorado of silver. A voyage to Tartessos, the Andalusian Atlantis (In which it will be seen that neither the Bible nor Herodotus ever said Tartessos was Spain. But only that it was in the West and beyond the Pillars of Hercules: exactly like Sardinia …); Chapter XXVIII, The Peoples-of-the-Sea versus Ramses III or the Very First World War). The author writes on culture for the daily newspaper La Repubblica.

Taking together place, time and manner, it would be possible to describe the encounter as comprising at least six modes: fragility, temporality, activity, integrity, causality and disparity.

It would be comforting to think of a disjunction between America at home and America in the world, to imagine the arrogance of government a matter of distance rather than character, to think of the billion people in the world who are starving and the epidemic of obesity in the United States as a failure of knowledge rather than of character. But there are so many who live poor in this, the richest country in the history of the world, that I now doubt both the ethics of America and the wisdom of its leadership in the ways of the world. The country seems to be now on a wrong path, having confused the momentary benefits of triumphant force with the real benefits of fairness. The cost in money to provide the poor of the world with potable water is nothing compared to the cost of war.

Stendhal said of one of his most significant works, De l'amour, published in 1822, that it was ‘ideological’. ‘Ideology’ in a pre-Marxist sense, the meaning used by Comte Destutt de Tracy, a contemporary of Napoleon, to whom we owe the term's invention, is a science. Emerging from the language developed by the empiricists, particularly the British ones, ideology as a discipline has the task of describing ideas, their components and especially their origins, its aim being to understand how ideas emerge and evolve. But instead of trying to study how an idea develops, Stendhal admitted that he was more interested in a particular feeling. And he embarks on a description of love, particularly from the second chapter on, with the clear aim of reaching an understanding of the emotion's components. In fact he will concern himself only with ‘passionate love’, amour passion. And this is important for several reasons that I shall explain, the context of the period being one of the most salient. At that time love was turning towards ‘passionate love’, that is, the passion par excellence. For the idea of love that had prevailed prior to the 19th century was not associated with passionate love. It is true that Stendhal had not failed to quote the Lettres de la religieuse portugaise (a 17th-century work, attributed to Mariana Alcoforado, a Portuguese nun, but which, as we now know, is part of French literature), nor other texts earlier than the 17th and 18th centuries that evoked a type of emotion as strong as passionate love. But, as the 18th turned into the 19th century, passionate love was, generally speaking, a novelty and Stendhal is among those who were to elaborate most extensively on this theme.

Français, vous avez la mémoire courte (You French have short memories) was the title of a film showing in a cinema opposite Saint-Sulpice church. It was the early 1960s; scarcely 15 years had passed since the end of the Second World War and the horrors of Nazism had not yet been fully revealed. Germany was an occupied and divided country. France was fighting in Algeria.

The fact of the underdevelopment of Africa is a direct challenge to the enlightened minds on the continent. Indeed, it is a burden that is borne with a certain amount of shame by those who are more sensitive and capable of deep reflection. They have often asked fundamental questions in frustration and anger, wondering what was wrong with Africa and with the African, seeking to know why Africans seemed incapable of rising above their reputation of being the ‘les damnés de la terre’ (‘the wretched of the earth’). Among the questions about Africa that have troubled such minds are the following:

1. - Why did Africa succumb to slavery like it did?

2. - Why was the enslavement of African peoples on African soil possible?

3. - Why has education failed to produce the kinds of societal changes that should normally have followed?

4. - Why does good governance continue to elude so many African countries, after over 40 years of independence?

5. - Might certain aspects of the African culture be standing in the way of the continent's development?

Whatever its other effects, the Soviet-American Cold War helped launch and sustain an era of feverish intellectual activity in the linked fields of international relations theory and foreign policy analysis. One sign of the importance of more recent phenomena with all their resonant impacts may be the continuing ferment in theorizing about international relations, foreign policy and public international law years after the war's conclusion, a ferment which the 9/11/01 terrorist attack on the United States and its aftermath have intensified. Comprehending the scholarly inquiries and debates in these fields should be important to intellectuals regardless of their professional interests, not only because those inquiries and debates concern profound epistemological and ontological issues, but primarily because they have influenced and continue to influence the trajectory of United States foreign policy.

American universities, which were pale copies of European counterparts before World War II, afterwards exploded into pragmatic centers of research and teaching. Previous isolationism turned into concern with foreign affairs. Change is now the slogan for many aspects of American society.

There are many of us saying and even demanding that research on Africa should be intensified and further increased. Its destiny is linked to the future of Africans’ self-awareness and their radical de-alienation. However, the current direction of some projects gives us cause for constant concern in that the fundamental question they raise is whether what drives them is science or a certain unstated but active ideology.

Ancient philosophers believed that three anecdotes are enough to characterize a philosophical temperament. As soon as I accepted the invitation to participate in a research devoted to the triple topic: ‘Trace, print, remains’, three anecdotes at once came to mind. I shall use them to establish a preliminary understanding of the concept of trace, which we shall subsequently approach from a more philosophical perspective.